rise in gray skies

Just sitting,
I see so much — I don’t see.
I please so much — I don’t please.
I am a friend so much — I’m not a friend.
I am in love so much — I’m not in love.
I know so much — I don’t know.

Yet still, I hope.

When my world’s illusive towers tumble together,
and choking dust disturbs a month of sleep,
I return to just sitting:
tasting the falling tears,
feeling their warm traces to my heart,
seeing what I’ve prepared myself to see.

Accepting the gray of this moment —
to experience equanimity.

Post Script

I wrote this during the painful aftermath of the same relationship remembered in Ordinary dragons. By then, the shared world had collapsed, but my mind had not yet arranged what had happened into a stable account. The opening contradictions are not riddles to solve. They record a person moving between incompatible truths: seeing and not seeing, loving and not loving, knowing and not knowing.

“Just sitting” does not cure that confusion or force it into a satisfying explanation. It gives the confusion somewhere to be experienced. Tears can be tasted, their warmth traced through the body, while the mind gradually becomes capable of seeing what had previously been unbearable or obscured.

“Yet still, I hope” remains deliberately unresolved. Hope had not yet learned whether it meant restoring the relationship or surviving it. The line contains attachment, endurance, and the first possibility that life might continue beyond the ruins of the world I had constructed.

Equanimity here does not mean indifference, approval, or immediate peace. It means accepting the gray of the present as the weather actually given, without denying grief or demanding certainty. The practice is not to turn gray into blue. It is to remain present enough to discover what else may already exist within the gray.

The accompanying photograph makes that movement visible. Blue and gold remain within the gray sky rather than waiting somewhere beyond it. The image does not promise that pain will disappear. It allows several colors, several truths, and several kinds of weather to occupy the same atmosphere.

Read beside Ordinary dragons, the poem preserves the other end of the emotional arc: not a denial of the earlier tenderness, but the difficult work of living after that tenderness could no longer sustain the shared world.

Image credit: Blue, gray and gold, my favorite sky (2012), by Bill Abbott. Source: Wikimedia Commons.